Mormonism, Alice Miller, and Me

In the past twenty years much has been written about unhealthy family dynamics and their later manifestation in adult dysfunctional behavior. One of the pioneers in this field is Alice Miller. Miller worked for more than twenty years as a Freudian psychoanalyst before eventually abandoning traditional Freudian theory. In The Drama of the Gifted Child,1 she describes what she believes to be the root cause of adult dysfunction and neurosis, and the path to healing from it. In this and subsequent books, she lays out her own healing journey and her discoveries in her work as a psychotherapist.2 

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Like many others, I have found Miller's work to be of tremendous value in my own healing. In many ways her discoveries describe not only my healing path in relation to my family, but also in my relationship with the church. In this paper I will explore how the family dynamics Miller writes about may also be applied to relationships with the church. I will begin with an overview of Miller's basic tenets, and then explore some of their applications to my relationship with the church.

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Miller's work begins with the premise that all children have a fundamental need to be respected and validated as the people they really are at any given time, and as the center – the central actor – in their own lives. The fulfillment of this need is essential for the development of a healthy sense of self in children. When Miller speaks of children “as they really are at any given time,” she is referring to their “emotions, sensations, and their expressions from the first day onward.” A child’s inner feelings and sensations form the core of the self, the “feeling of self” around which a sense of identity will develop.3

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In the first months and years of life children need to be at the center of their parent’s attention, and receive ongoing mirroring and validation from them. If children are lucky enough to grow up with mirroring parents who are able to meet their needs to be validated, understood, and respected as the unique individuals they are, then a healthy sense of self can develop in them.4

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Miller defines a healthy sense of self as “the unquestioned certainty that the feelings and wishes one experiences are a part of one’s self.”5 It is based on the authenticity of our own feelings. Spontaneous, natural contact with our own emotions, thoughts, and wishes is what gives us inner strength. It means that we can live out our feelings as they occur. We can allow ourselves to be afraid when threatened, or angry when our needs are not met. We know what we want and don’t want, and are able to express ourselves, regardless of whether or not we will be loved or hated for it.6

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Some of the conditions Miller finds in healthy families which enable children to develop a strong sense of self include:

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• Strivings for autonomy and independence are not experienced as an attack on the parents.

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• Aggressive impulses do not upset the confidence and self-esteem of the parents, and thus can be effectively neutralized.

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• There is no need to please anybody, and children are allowed to experience and express whatever is active in them during each stage of their development.

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• Children are allowed to experience and express strong feelings such as jealousy, anger, and defiance.

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• Because children are able to express ambivalent feelings, they learn that we all have both “good" and "bad” within us. They do not need to split off and repress the “bad” from the “good,” either in themselves or others.

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• Children can use their parents in child-appropriate ways, because their parents are independent of them.

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• Because parents love their children as individuals separate from themselves, children’s ability to experience healthy love is made possible.7

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When these conditions are present children are able, during the stage of separation, to give up their symbiosis with their parents and accomplish the steps of individuation and autonomy.8

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In order to provide this kind of healthy emotional environment, parents themselves need to have grown up in such an environment. If they did not, they need to have worked through the resolution of their own resulting unmet needs before they will be fully able to meet their children’s needs. Parents who have not become aware of and worked through their own unresolved needs remain emotionally deprived themselves. Throughout their lives they will seek, consciously or unconsciously, for what their own parents could not give them at the appropriate time. This search can never fully succeed, because it belongs to a time that has long since passed, when the self was first being formed. Nevertheless, adults with these unsatisfied and often unconscious needs will be repeatedly compelled to attempt their gratification through substitute means.9

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What happens when parents are unable, because they still have unmet needs of their own, to meet their children's emotional needs? It would be natural for children to feel anger and hurt when their legitimate needs are not met. But young children are completely dependent on their parents. Their parents’ love and care is essential for their existence, and they will do everything they can to avoid losing it. So before they are old enough to understand what they are doing, some children adapt to their parents’ failure to need their needs by suppressing these needs, along with their anger and hurt.10 Miller refers to this suppression of parts of the child's true self as a partial “killing off” of what is spontaneous and alive in the child. Some of her clients report dreams in which they experience themselves as partially dead:

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I see a green meadow, in which there is a white coffin. I am afraid that my mother is in it, but I open the lid and, luckily, it is not my mother but me.

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I am lying on my bed. I am dead. My parents are talking and looking at me, but they don’t realize that I am dead.11

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Miller believes that if these people had been able as children to experience and express all of their feelings, including their anger, disappointment, fear, and pain, they could have stayed fully alive. But that would have led to the loss of their parents’ love. So they “killed” (repressed) their anger and hurt, and with it a part of themselves, in order to preserve their parents’ love and care.12

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Miller describes several kinds of defense mechanisms and illusions children may develop in order to allow the continued repression of their true feelings and needs. These may include denial (“I‘m not afraid of that.” Or, “That doesn’t hurt me.”), intellectualization, projection of their repressed feelings onto others, and idealization. All of these defenses enable children to suppress the conscious experience of their real situation and the emotions belonging to it, which may only come to the surface years later. It is surprising to see how much of the reality of their early lives can sometimes remain hidden from a child's conscious awareness. This is because of their strong tendency for idealization, and because all children need to believe that they were truly loved by their parents.13

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When children repeatedly repress their feelings and needs, eventually it becomes difficult or even impossible for them to consciously experience certain feelings, either in childhood or later in adulthood. This continued repression results in the development of a “false self.” Children learn to reveal only what is expected or desired of them, and they fuse so completely with what they reveal that it becomes the whole of their conscious identity. They are not able to fully develop their true selves, because they are unable to live it. This is not necessarily an obstacle to their intellectual development, but it is an obstacle to the unfolding of their authentic emotional life, and a serious obstacle to later adult relationships. Over time, children may be able to completely adapt to the demands of their situation and develop a false self that seems to serve them well. But their unhealthy adaptation in childhood contains the seeds of their later adult dysfunctions.14

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While this process of suppression and denial is taking place, children are also internalizing their early experiences with their parents. This internalization results in the creation of our own “inner parents” – a presence that is incorporated into our psyches from an early age onward. When we have internalized our parents in this way, we no longer experience their influence as coming from outside of ourselves. We experience it as a part of ourselves – as the way we automatically think and feel – often without consciously seeing the connection to our parents’ treatment of us. One of Miller's clients relates the following:

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The day before yesterday I was so happy, my work went easily. I was able to do more work for the exam than I had planned for the whole week. Then I thought I must take advantage of this good mood and do another chapter in the evening. I worked all evening without any enthusiasm and the next day I couldn't do any more. ...nothing stayed in my head. I didn't want to see anyone either, it felt like the depressions I used to have. Then I "turned the pages back" and found where it had begun. I had spoiled my pleasure as soon as I made myself do more – but why? Then I remembered how my mother used to say: "You have done that beautifully, now you could surely do this too..."15

If we fail to become aware of the source of these kinds of unconscious, automatic responses, throughout our lives we may continue to conceal parts of our true selves from our inner parents, in order to maintain our childhood illusions and defenses. In this way, portions of our true feelings and needs may remain beyond our own conscious awareness, and the loneliness we experienced while growing up will eventually be replaced by isolation within ourselves.16

When this process of unhealthy adaptation has taken place in childhood, it leads to dysfunction of one kind or another in our adult lives and relationships. Some of the problems Miller repeatedly found in the lives of clients with unresolved childhood needs and feelings include depression and grandiosity, a compulsion to repeat, harmful parenting practices, and excessive emotional dependence on others.

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Adults who learned to repress their feelings in childhood, and who continue to unconsciously censor their own feelings, do not allow themselves to be overtaken by unexpected or unwanted emotions. Depression and feelings of inner emptiness and loneliness are the price they pay for this kind of emotional control. Miller views depression as a sign of the loss of the self, or alienation from the self, that results from the denial of one’s true feelings and needs. This denial begins as a necessary adaptation during childhood.17

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The other side of depression is grandiosity. Grandiosity may develop when children are required to maintain their family's image through their achievements, and are “loved” and accepted only to the extent that they are able to fulfill this demand with their good behavior, abilities, talents, beauty, etc. If they fail to uphold the family image, they are punished by being treated coldly or otherwise excluded from their parent’s affections.18

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When these children become adults, they may seek insatiably for admiration, using other people to get the mirroring they never received from their parents. Others exist to admire them, and they are dependent on this admiration. Unfortunately, they can never get enough of it to really satisfy their needs, because admiration is not the same thing as love. As long as it is their achievements that are being admired, they are not being loved for the people they really are. All of the admiration they receive only provides substitute gratification of their early needs for acceptance and validation – needs that have been repressed and therefore remain unconscious. And, "like every substitute, it can bring only [temporary] satiation. In fact, true satiation is no longer possible, since the right time for that now lies irrevocably in the past."19 None of our substitutes can fill our old voids. Only the conscious acceptance of and mourning for what we missed at the crucial time can lead to real healing.20

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Grandiose people often recount their earliest memories without any sympathy for the children they once were. They may demonstrate the ability to empathize with others, but when it comes to their own childhood experiences, they lack any real emotional understanding or appreciation for the difficulties they experienced, and have no awareness of their true needs, beyond the need for achievement.21

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People who are grandiose are generally admired and successful. They feel confident in their abilities and achievements, and will not attempt any new endeavor unless they are confident they can succeed at it. But behind all this there lurks a feeling of emptiness and self-alienation. Depression may come to the surface as soon as the drug of grandiosity fails, as soon as they are not the most successful or admired person in their group, or whenever they get the feeling that they have failed to measure up to the ideal image they hold for themselves. We are only free from this kind of depression when our sense of self is based on the authenticity of our own feelings, and not on the possession of certain talents or achievements.22

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Grandiose people may use their achievements to look down on others, believing that, “Without certain qualities (which, luckily, I have), a person is not worth loving. Without these ability, I would not be loved. But because I have them, I am worth loving.” Thus their superiority allows them to maintain the childhood illusion that they were truly loved. Also, contempt or ridicule for those whom we perceive to be weaker than us is the best defense against the breakthrough of our own unwanted feelings of weakness and vulnerability.23

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Grandiose people generally seek help only when a depressive episode forces them to do so. As long as the grandiose defense works, they experience no conscious suffering that would lead them to seek help. But they are never really free, because their sense of self is dependent on validation from outside of themselves, and on qualities and achievements that can fail.24

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In addition to depression and grandiosity, unhealthy childhood adaptation can also lead to what Miller calls a “compulsion to repeat” in adulthood. The compulsion to repeat is the tendency in adulthood to unconsciously create new situations in which our unremembered childhood dramas are emotionally replayed, in an attempt to find in adulthood what we needed but failed to receive in our childhood.25 For example, if we felt abandoned (either emotionally or physically) in childhood, but repressed the feelings associated with that experience, as adults we may repeatedly be drawn to relationships in which we are abandoned, or fear being abandoned. We may be drawn to partners who are rejecting or emotionally unavailable (as our parents were), and then try desperately to make them love and value us, tailoring our behavior and personality to match their desires. In such relationships we may feel deep fear, to the point of panic, at the possibility of losing the other person. We may feel a desperate need to keep them in our lives no matter what the cost, even if they treat us badly. All of this is because our repressed early experience of abandonment has been triggered, and we are reacting not just to the current person in the present situation, but also to our early experiences and our repressed fear and pain regarding them.26 The compulsion to repeat may be played out in a variety of personal or professional settings in our adult lives, whenever the emotional dynamics of our early experiences are recreated and replayed.

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In her practice Miller also encountered adults who continued to reenact their childhood dramas in their relationships with their own children. When parents still have unmet needs from their own childhood, unconsciously, and despite their best intentions, they may use their children to meet these needs. They experience their child not as the center of his or her own activity, but as a part of themselves. If their children do not behave as they wish or need them to, they are deeply hurt and disappointed. Loss of control over their children may lead to uncontrolled anger. These parents may attempt to take from their children (or train their children to give them) the things they never received from their own parents – including respect, devotion, and the presence of someone who always takes them seriously. This can all be done under the conscious rationale of simply training children to be respectful, dutiful, and proper, which is “for their own good” (as Miller later titled another book.).27

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This does not happen because parents are bad, but because they themselves remain emotionally deprived, and are still dependent on a specific echo from their child in order to maintain their own emotional equilibrium. They themselves, though quite unconsciously, are still in search of a mirror for their own validation and worth. Their child serves this purpose, because a child is at its parents’ disposal. A child will not run away or abandon its parents (as the parents own parents may have done). Parents can impose their feelings on their children, and see themselves mirrored in their children’s love and admiration. They can feel strong and powerful in their children’s presence, which they did not feel themselves when they were children. When parents have had to suppress all of these needs in relation to their own parents, their needs will continue to live in them on an unconscious level, and will seek gratification through whatever sources are available, including their own children. This can happen regardless of how educated and well-intentioned the parents may be.28

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Miller is careful to point out that this does not rule out strong parental love and devotion. On the contrary, such parents often love their children intensely, because their children meet their repressed needs. But this is not the way children need to be loved. Children need parents who are not emotionally dependent on them, and they need a supportive environment in which they can experience and express all of their own feelings. In healthy families, children can be sad or happy or angry whenever anything makes them sad or happy or angry. They don't have to look cheerful for someone else, or suppress their feelings in order to meet their parents’ needs. They can be angry at their parents without losing their love.29

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Parents may have the best of intentions to provide a nurturing environment for their children, and yet be unable to do so. They cannot be aware of the ways in which they fail to meet their children's needs, or how this lack affects their children, if they have never allowed themselves to consciously experience their own unmet needs. They will remain unable to realize the full effect of their behavior on their children, because they themselves have never been able to consciously experience their own pain at having been treated in similar ways. This mistreatment may take various forms, ranging from emotional or physical neglect to emotional, verbal, or physical abuse.30

Unhealthy adaptation in childhood also manifests itself in adult relationships as excessive emotional dependence on others. This dependency is the result of what Miller calls “bond permanence,” or the inability to individuate – to separate psychologically and emotionally from one's parents. Parents who have unresolved emotional needs benefit when their children do not individuate at the appropriate stage of their development, because the parents are able to hold on to what they have found in their child’s “false self” – a source of substitute gratification of their repressed needs. The children, who have been unable to develop their own strong sense of self, remain first consciously and then unconsciously dependent on their parents. They cannot rely on their own feelings, because they have not experienced and learned to understand them through trial and error. They have no sense of their own real needs, and are alienated from their deepest selves.31

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When these children reach adolescence, they often rebel by adopting new friends and values in opposition to the wishes of their parents. Because they have not been able to separate emotionally from their parents and are still driven to seek fulfillment of the needs their parents failed to meet, they will conform to their friends, who serve as emotional substitutes for their parents, in much the same way as they previously attempted to conform to their parents. With their friends, as with their parents before, they will do anything to be accepted and loved in the ways they once, as a child, so desperately needed. Even as adults they will remain dependent on parental substitutes – on partners, friends, organizations, or their own children – for affirmation and a sense of self. But searching for substitute gratification of unmet childhood needs in adult relationships ultimately fails, because it is not realistic to seek or expect in adult relationships what can only effectively be given to a child in the context of the parent-child relationship.32

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Miller believes that freedom from our early wounds and resulting dysfunctions is not possible without the work of “true, deep, and defenseless mourning” for what we needed but did not receive at the crucial time in our childhood. All of our substitutes can bring only temporary satisfaction of our needs. True satisfaction is no longer possible, because the time for that lies irreversibly in the past. None of our substitutes can permanently fill our emptiness. Only the conscious acceptance of and mourning for what we missed at the crucial time can lead to real healing. Without this mourning, our wounds can only be denied or covered up, or else constantly torn open again and again in our compulsion to repeat.33

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Real healing cannot happen with words, but only through experience. What is unconscious cannot be abolished with logic, admonitions, or rules. But we can develop a conscious awareness of it and experience it, and in this way gain control over it. If real healing is to occur, at some point our repressed feelings and needs must emerge. When they do, they are often accompanied by deep pain and despair. As children we may not have been able to survive this intense emotional and psychological pain, because this would have only been possible in an empathetic, emotionally supportive environment, which is exactly what we lacked. But as adults we have the psychological resources necessary to experience strong emotions and allow them to run their course, thereby neutralizing them.34

We can discover clues to repressed childhood feelings by becoming aware of those situations in which we overreact, are hypersensitive, or experience other reactions that are unwarranted by the present situation. This is a strong indicator that something in our present situation has triggered a repressed early experience or feeling, and we are reacting not just to the present situation, but to our early experience and the feelings associated with it. The more unrealistic our feelings are given the present reality, the more likely it is that they stem from repressed childhood experiences. To make these discoveries we must pay attention to our present feelings and take them seriously. If we deny or reason away our feelings, important self-discoveries cannot take place.35

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The process of allowing repressed feelings to surface and run their course may continue for some time. We will find ourselves working through the issues of our childhood as they surface in our relationships with friends, family members, co-workers, and others. Once we have learned through experience that the breakthrough of painful feelings will not destroy us, and that these feelings eventually pass, we will approach “undesired” feelings differently. We will no longer be compelled to follow the same unhealthy pattern of detachment from our feelings followed by depression, because we now have a new possibility – that of dealing with our emotional life – experiencing all of our feelings as they occur. In this way we gain access to those parts of ourselves that have previously been hidden from us. It is only after the self becomes liberated from repression that it begins to grow, express itself, and develop its true spirit and creativity.36

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It is one of the turning points in healing when we are able to experience the reality that much of the love we have struggled so hard to gain with so much self-denial was not intended for us as we really were, but rather for our false selves. When we realize how much of ourselves we have sacrificed in order to gain this love, we will feel a desire to end the courtship. We will discover in ourselves a new authority – a need to live according to our true selves. And we will no longer strive to earn a love that, “at root, still leaves us empty-handed, since it is given to our false self, which we have begun to relinquish.”37

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When we have faced the reality of our childhood, we will see that all our lives we have struggled to ward off something that has already happened. “[Our] loss...has already happened in the past, and no effort whatsoever can ever change this fact.”38 When we are able to accept this reality, we will no longer be driven to create illusions and dysfunctions in order to avoid it. Unhealthy behaviors that we could not be admonished or shamed into giving up can be surrendered when they are no longer driven by an unconscious need to maintain our illusions and ward off our repressed feelings.39

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The dream of finally receiving what we needed from our parents – a dream which many adults both consciously and unconsciously still hope and search for – is unattainable. But the experience of our own truth and the post-childhood understanding of it makes it possible for us to return to the world of feelings at an adult level – without paradise, but with the ability to feel. And with this ability, we can finally develop our own sense of self – the self we were never able to develop in childhood.40

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When we have worked through our childhood experiences, we will have regained our sense of being alive. “The true opposite of depression is not gaiety or absence of pain, but vitality: the freedom to experience spontaneous feelings.”41 We cannot have this freedom if our childhood roots are cut off. Living out of our true selves is only possible when we no longer have to fear the intense emotional world of our early childhood. Once we have experienced this world, it is no longer threatening, and need no longer be repressed and hidden.42

When we have experienced for ourselves how we were manipulated, even unintentionally, in the process of our upbringing, we will be able to see through present manipulations quicker, and will feel less of a need to manipulate others. We will be able to join groups without becoming dependent on them, and will be in less danger of idealizing people or organizations. And we will recognize other’s suffering more easily and will not discount or belittle their feelings, because we no longer deny our own suffering or discount our own feelings.43

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In my own life, learning to experience and express repressed feelings and needs has helped me to find my own voice, and this has spilled over into every area of my life, including my religious life. The stronger my own voice has become, the clearer my experiences and feelings about Mormonism have become. I have come to see many ways in which the dynamics Miller describes also apply to my experience of the church. I realize there are as many different experiences of Mormonism as there are Mormons, and I can only speak with complete authority to my own experiences.

I grew up in a very active Mormon family. The church permeated every aspect of my world. As a young child I took to heart everything I learned in church, and built my understanding and experience of reality around it. I knew that I was a child of God, and that before I was born I lived with my Heavenly Father. He sent me to earth to gain a body and to learn to choose between right and wrong. If I chose the right and kept the commandments, one day I would be able to return and live with him forever. Because my parents had been married in the temple, our family could be together forever if we all lived the gospel. And if I kept myself worthy to go to the temple, someday I could get married and have a family of my own to be with forever. This was the lens through which I saw and interpreted everything – myself, my family, and the world.

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On the surface there was nothing wrong with these simple doctrines. I saw only goodness and beauty in them the whole time I was growing up. But what I didn't see during all that time were the psychological and emotional forces that came into play in my acceptance and incorporation of these beliefs. For example, Miller describes the mental and emotional lengths children often go to in order to suppress their own needs and feelings when the expression of them might cost them their parents’ love and care. In the Mormon worldview as I understood it in childhood, the psychological risks for children were even greater. For me to have consciously experienced feelings or beliefs that did not agree with what I was taught in the church would have meant not only risking the loss of my parents’ love in this life, but also eternal separation from them (as well as the loss of my chance to ever live with my heavenly parent again).

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I don’t recall a specific incident in my childhood in which I was straightforwardly told, “You must think and believe this way, or you will never see your family again after you die.” But it was certainly implied as the only logical conclusion to what I was directly taught – which was that only those families who believe in Mormonism and are sealed in a Mormon temple will be together forever. In some ways the indirect threat that results from this teaching is more difficult to deal with than a straightforward threat would be. When a threat is presented clearly and straightforwardly, it can be seen for what it really is, and dealt with directly. But when the threat is indirect, or only implied as part of what is presented as a beautiful, eternal truth, it can sometimes be difficult to consciously realize that this unspoken threat is a motivating force in our lives.

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To teach young children, even indirectly, that unless they feel and believe certain things, they will be separated from their families for all of eternity seems to me now to be a kind of emotional blackmail. It plays heavily on a child's fear of abandonment. In Mormon theology, faith and family cannot be separated. To deny our faith is to also risk severing eternal ties to the people we love and need the most, and to hurt our family throughout eternity. This gives our theology a powerful conscious and unconscious tool – our love and need for our family – with which to ensure acceptance and compliance. But genuine spiritual belief and commitment must be freely chosen. They cannot be compelled under the threat of losing one’s family, even if these threats are unintended or not directly communicated. If we are not truly free to say no, then we are also not truly free to say yes.

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I also see this perhaps unintended manipulation of family affections in our policies regarding attendance at temple sealings. I experienced this for myself when one of my sisters married in the temple several years ago. At the time, I had made a voluntary decision to stop attending the temple. Having one of my sisters marry during this time showed me a perspective on temple marriage that I hadn’t seen before. Through the church's policy of only allowing Mormon temple recommend holders to attend temple marriages, I was being told, in effect, that unless I felt and believed what the church said I should, and was willing to commit myself completely to the church, I would not be allowed to attend my own sister's wedding. This feels like more emotional blackmail, and I believe it damages family relationships because it makes them conditional. It makes the acceptance of certain theological beliefs a prerequisite for full inclusion in important family celebrations.

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A friend of mine from a devout Mormon family married a non-member, and before her wedding her father told her that if she saw tears in his eyes during the wedding, they wouldn't be tears of joy. When I look back on that situation now, I don’t believe that my friend’s decision to marry a non-member was the true source of her father’s unhappiness. The real source of his pain was within himself – in his own exclusive religious beliefs.

In addition to being manipulative of our family ties, I think our temple policies can also be spiritually manipulative. When two people fall in love and want to get married, if they are from devout Mormon families there is only one socially acceptable way for them to marry – in the temple. To marry outside of the temple brings disappointment and heartache for the family as well as a certain amount of shame within the Mormon community. But in order to marry in the temple, couples must pass a worthiness interview in which they profess belief in all the tenets of Mormonism. In addition, temple marriage requires a prior endowment in which lifelong commitments to the church are made. This means that if I fall in love and desire to marry (as most young people in or out of Mormonism eventually do), the only way I can get married that will not wound my family and bring us shame within the larger community is to also profess my belief in Mormonism and make lifelong commitments to it. These two things are so tightly bound together that one hardly even considers the possibility of doing one and not the other. This provides a very powerful unconscious motivation for young people in love to make a lifelong commitment to Mormonism, and unconscious motivations are the strongest and most difficult to see through.